The success of the tablet means that some touch gestures have trickled down to the old-fashioned laptop user and their lowly trackpads. But with a surface the size of a beer mat, the trackpad's options are limited. Why not extend the pad across the whole bottom of the laptop, giving more room for gestures and making the touchpad more useful?

The obvious problem with this idea is that it would leave nowhere for your hands to rest as you type. I still brush my trackpad accidentally during particularly furious typing, even with it hidden between my wrists. Now a group of researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, have redesigned the touchpad to work using infrared light reflectance, doing away with accidental touches almost entirely, and spreading the touchpad across the whole bottom half of the laptop in the process.

We already have displays at our fingertips - one day, we might have them ON our fingertips. Engineers in Taiwan are investigating ways to coat fingernails in organic light emitting materials and display useful content instead of the latest garish styles from the nail salon.

The aim is to continue the visual display that's on your smartphone or tablet's screen, even when your fingernails are obscuring it. Chao-Huai Su and colleagues at National Taiwan University in Taipei don't care that the NailDisplay technology they visualise doesn't exist yet - they are trying to work out how we will use it when it does arrive. So they created a clunky, half-centimetre-thick, 2.5-cm diagonal OLED screen and attached it to a large finger ring so they could give the idea a test drive.

Luis von Ahn is an ambitious guy. He's best known for putting a twist on CAPTCHAs - the squiggly fragments of text that websites deploy to beat spammers' automated software - that he called reCAPTCHA. Von Ahn realised that when we solve a CAPTCHA we could be helping to decipher text that book-digitisation software has tried and failed to transcribe. Google liked the idea so much that it bought reCAPTCHA in 2009, and now uses the technique to help power its book-scanning project.

Von Ahn's current project may be his most ambitious yet. Duolingo is a website where people can learn a language for free and help to translate web content at the same time. Not everyone thinks it will work, but von Ahn now has evidence that one part of the challenge - the learning bit - is performing as hoped.

It is one of the most iconic speeches of all time, and now it has been immortalised in a very unusual way. A snippet of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I have a dream" speech has been stored in the alphabet of DNA.

A tribute to internet activist Aaron Swartz replaced the home page for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, in an apparent act of protest over the university's role in the legal case that led up to Swartz's suicide on 11 Jan.

For a short time, visitors to the MIT.edu home page found a message that read: "R.I.P. Aaron Swartz. Hacked by grand wizard of Lulzsec, Sabu. God Bless America. Down With Anonymous." The background was watermarked with words from a blog post, written by Swartz, titled "Immoral".

While some 3D printers can make many of the parts needed to make a copy of themselves, most need human help to assemble the final product. Not for much longer: machines could soon be making machines if Roomba maker iRobot gets its way.

Think of it as satnav for your waist. The "vibrobelt", a vibrating belt to help guide cyclists, has proven successful in early tests. It uses vibrating actuators that indicate left, right, backward and forward turn directions, and even tickles the user with coded buzzes that tell them how far they have to go to their destination.

Along with birthdays, names of pets and ascending number sequences, add one more thing to the list of password no-nos: good grammar.

An algorithm developed by Ashwini Rao and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, makes light work of cracking long passwords which make grammatical sense as a whole phrase, even if they are interspersed with numbers and symbols. Rao's algorithm makes guesses by combining words and phrases from password-cracking databases into grammatically correct phrases. While other cracking programs make multiple guesses based on each word in a database, putting in "catscats" and "catsstac" as well as just the word "cats", none of the programs make the jump to combine multiple words or phrases in a way that makes grammatical sense, like "Ihave3cats", for instance.

Information flicks onto an iPad screen of its own accord as I walk through a technology exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science. Extra details about rovers and planetary exploration pop up as I sidle over to the Mars Yard, and are replaced as I make just a small step to the right.

I'm experiencing ByteLight, a new type of location technology which uses LED bulbs to deliver exact location information indoors. It's accurate to within a metre, whereas Wi-Fi triangulation can only place you within a spherical bubble several metres in diameter (meaning it might not even know which floor you're on), and works in places where GPS signals can't go. Each bulb flashes in a unique pattern that humans don't see but which identifies the bulb's location via a smartphone or tablet camera. Software then works out where you are by knowing which bulb you are standing closest to.

Micromechanical chips that pump chemicals and living cells around them are already being used to amplify DNA strands and make health diagnoses. Now a new use for these miniature microchip marvels is being patented in the US: blowing things up.

It's not quite as bad as it sounds: the idea is to make weapons magazines safer. When shells, bombs and rockets are stored near a combat front line there's always a risk that a stray piece of shrapnel or a bullet will strike one of the munitions - and if it hits the warhead's detonator (which includes a small initiating explosive charge) the whole lot could go sky high.

But Qinetiq, the Farnborough, UK-based defence lab, says the smaller the detonator is, the less of a target it presents to bullets and shrapnel - and the lower the risk of an unintended explosion. So in US patent application 2013/0008334, published on 10 January, it outlines how a tiny, hard-to-hit detonator can be built by using the arrays of microcavities in modern microelectromechanical chips to store tiny amounts of initiating explosive.

I tiptoe through the courtyard as snowflakes float from the sky.I glance to the left and see a few knights having a chat by the fruit stall. I look up and see a tattered awning above my head. I look down and realise I don't have a body.

This rather disconcerting moment took place during a test of the prototype Oculus Rift gaming headset that its backers hope is going to rescue virtual reality from the technological scrapheap. Developed by hardware hacker Palmer Luckey - a self-confessed VR obsessive who has collected 43 different VR headsets in his bid to create the perfect experience - the immersion it creates is quite remarkable. It became a crowdfunded Kickstarter project after Luckey gave an early prototype to legendary games creator John Carmack.

I'm slicing and dicing my way through melons as if my life depends on it, every twitch of my finger dispatching another pile of soft fruit. This is Fruit Ninja as it has never been played before - using the Leap, the much-hyped gestural control device made by start-up firm Leap Motion that is set to launch worldwide in March.

So, finally, it is here. Pebble, the smart watch that syncs with your smartphone and social media, is about to start shipping out to the thousands of very patient crowdfunding backers who have been waiting months to get their hands on one.

Are you one of those people that, as soon as they are get a new plant, it is merely a matter of time before the poor thing is just a sad, dried mass of shrivelled leaves? Then a new gadget called Flower Power, unveiled at the International CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada yesterday, could be just the thing to help you pretend your fingers really are green.

Developed by Parrot, the French firm that brought us the quad-rotor AR drone, Flower Power is a Bluetooth-enabled stick that you simply shove in the soil with your plant, after having chosen from a list of around 6000 plants which one you are trying not to kill. Sensors in the stick monitor the moisture in the soil, sunlight and whether you need to add any more fertiliser and then send that info via a low-powered version of Bluetooth to the cloud. It's meant to keep on sending data for up to six months before needing a battery change.

The data is analysed and compared with set parameters for the particular type of plant. "We think of it as putting your garden on the internet," says Henri Seydoux, Parrot's CEO. The stick and accompanying Android app are due to be released later this year.

The app displays all the info you need about your plant and flags up areas of concern using colour-coded warning signs, telling you when your beloved bit of flora needs a top up. Graphs show you how they are all faring. In theory, it will leave little excuse for killing that plant that was given to you by your friendly neighbour. In practice, I probably still will. But at least I'll know why this time.

Don't stomp on this little robot - not yet, anyway. VELOCIRoACH, a small cardboard hexapod modelled on a cockroach, can run at 2.7 metres per second, placing it among the fastest robots in the world.

Boston Dynamics' LS3, which can trot at up to 3.2 m/s, still holds the speed record for a self-powered robot. VELOCIRoACH ties for second with the company's six-legged RHex. But VELOCIRoACH is by far the fastest for its size: in 1 second, it can skitter 26 times the length of its body.

"You would die if you crashed right now." Would such a warning make you take your foot off the accelerator? That's the idea behind a scheme to warn drivers of the consequences of speeding developed by engineers at Japan's Fukuoka Institute of Technology and heavy goods vehicle maker UD Trucks, also in Japan. They are developing what they call a "safe driving promotion system" that warns drivers what kind of crash could ensue if they don't slow down.

It's a stomach-turning idea - but an invention detailed in a US patent application published by Aspire Bariatrics of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, nevertheless holds out the hope of a treatment for morbid obesity without the invasive surgery and drawbacks of a gastric bypass.

The idea is to let patients eat and drink as much as they like - but they then drain their stomach some 20 minutes after a meal by connecting a pump to a valve surgically installed on their abdominal wall. You can see how it's fitted - with some of the tech passed in via the mouth and some via the abdominal wall - in the video here.

As it's now 2013 many people will, quite rightly, be tapping their local futurist on the shoulder and asking, "So, where is my flying car?" All is not lost, though: the technology that could make flying cars a reality is making some headway, at least in software.